Friday The 13th

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The game's story takes place during another calm and warm summer at Crystal Lake Camp. This summer the camp hosts many children and you play the role of a counselor! There are six different characters to choose from that sport different abilities and levels of strength, panic and sanity. You may switch to another character whenever is necessary. Your main goal is to protect 15 children as well as your colleagues from Jason Voorhees. His attacks are random though, which means you spend most of your time dashing toward his location and trying to beat the clock, allowing little space for exploration that's necessary to build up your weapons and kill Jason for good. The killer appears in two different places: the area’s trails or inside cabins, killing his victims. On the trails there’s no warning except of a slight change in the game's music tune every time Jason appears. You must hit him several times before he disappears again. When Jason is killing someone inside a cabin, a countdown shows up along with a blinking green spot on the map to mark this particular attack. Once inside a cabin, you have to search each room looking for Jason. But things get even worse there, as Crystal Lake is also overrun by an endless horde of zombies, wolves, and deadly crows (!) If you die, you lose everything you own, unless you give them to another counselor. If all children finally die, you simply lose the game. Fortunately there are several items to collect such as vitamins (to recover a small amount of energy) or items that can be used as weapons or torches etc. Tossing a steady beam at zombies or even at Jason, does massive damage while you can also throw rocks, pitchforks and more. You need to find some keys in different areas of the map to open locked cabins. In terms of gameplay, the NES version differs from Domark's 8bit home computer versions, as this one runs in a pseudo-3D environment and follows a quite different story.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics are colorful and the sprites are well animated (and look quite funny). The backgrounds are nicely depicting forests, cabins and the whole Crystal Lake area. The levels are vast and well detailed and resemble enough the frantic atmosphere of the movie. The sound has a few chip tunes taken from the movie (most of them being brief loops) and a bunch of basic sound effects.